Good Aim
by the one who hums
Summary: "I want to be a Pokémon trainer when I get older, and I need to have a good aim if I'm going to be catching Pokémon in Pokéballs!" My interpretation of what would happen if Ash and Misty had met when they were five-years-old.


**A/N:** This has been sitting on my flash drive for a while and I finally got around to finishing it. Just a little idea about what it would be like if Ash and Misty met when they were five. You can just treat this as something that happened when they were younger that neither remembered when they met later in life.

Disclaimer: If I owned Pokémon, Misty would still be on the show, and Ash would have never ditched his Pidgeot. Obviously I don't own it. Sad day.

* * *

Misty looked around the ballroom in bewilderment. Flooding the large ballroom were women in floor-length dresses and men in sleek tuxedos. Many of them were dancing, doing elegant twirls and dips around the marble floor. The others were sitting at the tables on one side of the room, eating fancy hors d'oeuvres and talking about their happy lives. Misty was sitting at a table with her big sister Daisy, watching the party people go by and wondering in frustration why they had to be there. The scents of a hundred different perfumes filled her nostrils, causing her to hold her breath.

"What are you doing?" Daisy questioned her, noticing her younger sister's puffed-up cheeks and a hand covering her nose.

Misty let out a big breath of air and looked up at her sister with big blue eyes. "Can we go home now?"

"Of course not! We just got here. Why on earth would you want to go home?" Misty turned her head to glare at the ballroom. She hated going to these parties. There were always too many people there, and they were all adults anyways. She couldn't run into the middle and go twirl with the other people. Daisy held her hand the entire time, and made sure that Misty "acted like a lady." So the five year-old would smile and nod when all the grown-ups told her how pretty she was in her puffy party dress, and once they were gone she would be begging to go home again.

"Please?" she begged. "I hate these parties. I don't wanna stay any longer." She looked down at the powder blue monstrosity of a dress Daisy made her wear. The puffy sleeves made her shoulders itch, and the dark blue sash kept coming untied. She wished she was back at home in her bathing suit swimming with her sisters' Pokémon in the big gym pool.

"Misty," Daisy said sternly, "You know we're here for a reason. If we don't go to these functions, we don't get funds for our Gym. If our Gym isn't sponsored, it gets shut down. Then where are we going to live and earn our money?"

Misty didn't have an answer, but continued to pout anyway. "I know!" her older sister said happily, clapping her hands together. "Why don't you go outside in the courtyard? I saw a fountain with Magikarp swimming in it when we walked in."

Needing no further prompting, Misty scurried out of the ballroom and into the summer air. The sun was setting in the distance, but the air hadn't cooled in the slightest. It was a warm summer day, and it would be a warm night too. She wiped the sweat off the back of her neck and ran over to the fountain in the center of the courtyard.

The fountain was composed of a woman in a long flowing dress with her hands above her head in a ballet pose. Water shot out of her fingertips and into the deep basin below it, where Magikarp were swimming in lazy circles. Misty dipped her hands in the water and watched the Magicarp swim away from the little ripples she made in the water.

Then, out of nowhere, she heard a _thunk! _She stopped splashing in the water and listened carefully, not caring when a Magikarp swam up to her hand and began nibbling on her fingertip. She heard the noise again, and identified it as coming from behind her. She turned around slowly to see who was in the courtyard with her.

A young boy around her age was in the courtyard with a pile of Pokéballs beside him. He was wearing a dress shirt with the sleeves carelessly rolled up and an untied bow tie was slung around his neck. She couldn't tell his hair color from where she was sitting, about forty feet away, but it was dark. Most of it was hidden beneath a red and white hat that was turned backwards.

Oblivious to the girl sitting next to the fountain, the boy picked a Pokeball out of the pile and, with a quick flick of his arm, threw it at the trunk of the maple tree. _Thunk!_ He picked up another Pokéball and, as quick as the last time, pitched the Pokéball towards the tree trunk. It hit in the exact same spot.

"What are you doing?" Misty finally asked as he picked up another Pokéball. He jumped at the sound of her voice and threw the red and white orb too wide, causing it to fly past the tree and into the bushes.

She stood up and hurried over to him as he crouched to the ground to pick up another Pokéball. "You made me miss!" he said with a scowl.

She ignored the comment and repeated the question as he threw another Pokéball toward the tree, hitting it in the same spot and making the same _thunk!_ "What are you doing?"

"Practicing," he muttered as he threw his last Pokéball. It hit the trunk at the wrong angle, missing his target and bouncing into another bush. The boy sighed and began trudging toward the bushes behind the trees to retrieve his Pokéballs.

"I'll get them," Misty said, already hurrying behind the maple tree. She reached the bushes and got down on her hands and knees to grab the Pokéballs, not caring a bit about getting dirt on her new dress. She grabbed a Pokéball from beneath a bush and scuttled to another to find the other. She looked over her shoulder at the boy, who had already retrieved the four other Pokéballs and was returning to where he stood before. "Practicing what, exactly?"

As she picked up the other Pokéball, she heard the boy shuffle his feet behind her. "I'm practicing my throwing," he muttered somewhat sheepishly. She turned around to look at him while he spoke. "I want to be a Pokémon trainer when I get older, and I need to have a good aim if I'm going to be catching Pokémon in Pokéballs!"

"Huh," she thought aloud. "I never thought about that before. I always just assumed the Pokéball just kind of went towards the Pokémon by itself."

"That's not how it works!" The boy cried out, startling Misty. "If you miss your aim, the Pokéball lands in the bushes, just like mine did. If you don't practice your aim, you could end up missing your chance to catch a really cool Pokémon!" He picked up one of the Pokéballs by his feet and threw it with complete accuracy at the tree trunk. _Thunk!_ "Look! I just caught a Growlithe!" He shouted in make-believe.

She looked at one of the Pokéballs in her hand and smirked as she wound her arm back and threw it, hitting the boy square in the forehead. "Look," she smiled to herself, "I just caught a dork."

"What was that for?!" The boy wailed from where he had fallen on the ground.

She jogged over to him and grabbed his hand to help him to his feet. "So, whose Pokéballs are those?" She said, skillfully avoiding responding to his question.

He looked at her with a scowl. "Mine."

Misty's eyes widened with shock. "No way! Those can't be yours! You're not old enough to be a licensed trainer!" She shook her head in disbelief. "There's no way those Pokéballs belong to you."

He turned his nose up and looked down at her. "Well, they are. Professor Oak gave them to me."

She looked at him in puzzlement, having no idea who Professor Oak was. "Why would he give you Pokéballs when you're not old enough to catch Pokémon yet?"

He sighed and motioned for her to come closer. She closed the distance between them and he plucked the Pokéball she was holding from her hand. "Do you see that?" He asked, pointing to the bottom of the Pokéball.

Misty looked up the boy, then down at the Pokéball again. "See what?"

He brought the ball closer to her face, and pointed to a small crack at the bottom. "That." He gave the orb back to Misty, and she examined it closer. "That crack is why I get to keep the Pokéball. Since it's broken, it doesn't work anymore. I could throw it a Pokémon right now and it wouldn't do a thing. If a Pokéball is broken in any way, it won't work. All of those Pokéballs are broken."

Misty picked up another Pokéball and looked at the bottom, and seeing there was no crack, began flipping it over and over looking for the imperfection. "What's wrong with this one?" She questioned him when she couldn't find anything wrong with it.

"Try pressing the button." She did so, pushing in the button on the center of the Pokéball, and noticed that the ball did not open. "Professor Oak said that release clip on the inside must be stuck, and that's why it won't open."

Her eyes widened. "Does that mean there could be Pokémon stuck inside here?"

The boy shook his head. "Nope. Professor Oak has a machine to scan the Pokéball for Pokémon inside, and he said that one was empty."

They sat on the ground in the courtyard for a while after that. Misty asked the boy about every imperfection on the six Pokéballs he owned, and he was eager to tell her. Finally she asked him why he was practicing his aim so early, since he couldn't be much older than Misty was herself.

"I'm going to be a Pokémon Master!" He shouted, climbing to his feet. "I need to start practicing now if I want to be a Master by the time I'm twenty."

Misty laughed out loud. "Twenty? Good luck with that. The youngest Pokémon Master right now is thirty-two. At least, that's what he said. He looked older to me, though."

She thought that Ash's eyes were going to pop out of his head. "You've _met_ him?"

"My family owns a Gym. We meet lots of famous people."

The boy smirked. "Then you might want to take a picture now, because you're meeting someone destined to be famous." He held out his scrawny arms and made two muscles, though Misty could barely tell he was flexing. He flashed her a smile as he posed, and she laughed and laughed at how ridiculous he looked, with his too-big dress shirt and backwards hat and baby muscles.

"Why are you laughing at me?"

She wiped the tears away and grinned at him. "No reason. So what's your name, Mr. Pokémon Master?"

"I'm—"

"Ash Ketchum, you better not have gotten dirt all over you! You still need to take a picture with your father and I!" Ash's eyes widened in fright as he looked down at his shirt, which was already covered in spots.

He looked around the courtyard frantically until he found his suit jacket, which he had left on a bench. He put it on and did his best to do up the buttons. He looked to Misty. "Can you tell? Is there any dirt?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "What dirt?"

Ash smiled at her and turned to grab a green backpack from under the bench. He brought it over to Misty and put all the Pokéballs inside it. He looked to Misty. "I should go before Mom sees me out here playing." He put the backpack on his shoulders and stuck his hand out at Misty. "It was nice meeting you…"

"Misty."

"It was nice meeting you, Misty!" He said without missing a beat. "When I turn ten and get my Pokémon, you and I need to have a battle! Deal?"

She squeezed his hand and shook it once more. "Deal."

He ran back to his mom, who was waiting at the door for him. He turned and waved to her as his mom pulled him back into the sea of people.

Misty stayed outside for a moment longer, thinking about their exchange, when she realized that she never asked where Ash lived so she could see him again when they were old enough to battle. She ran to the door to find the boy, but his red and white hat was nowhere to be seen. Misty sighed, wondering if she would actually ever see the boy again. She walked back toward Daisy, who looked like she had just finished talking to someone. "Can we go now?"

Daisy nodded and took her little sister's hand. As they walked out of the ballroom, Daisy asked what Misty wanted to do when she got home. She thought of Ash and the deal that they made.

"I need to practice my aim."

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**A/N:** That was fun to write. I need to write more Pokémon.

Tell me what you thought in that fancy little review box at the bottom of the screen! Reviews are fuel to keep me going!


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